Robbie Searcy, an ERCOT spokeswoman, explained that forced outages took 3,700 MW of power generation offline at the most critical time.

About half of that was weather related at two plants in North Texas. ERCOT declined to identify which plants, saying that information isn’t not released to the public until 60 days after the event, Searcy said.

That left between 1,300 to 1,400 MW of operating reserve, far below the 1,750 MW trigger for Emergency Alert Level 2. That prompted ERCOT to call for conservation while asking big power users to cut back immediately, a program called demand response.

"We were able to prevent rotating outages due in part to the performance of the demand response," Searcy said.

Just after 9 a.m. Monday, ERCOT canceled the Emergency Alert 2 and just after 9 a.m. Tuesday, the call for conservation also ended.

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